Socialist Cowboys

In last week’s issue, Rivka Galchen detailed the German mania for the writer Karl May, whose campy nineteenth-century novels about American Indians remain among the most commercially successful in the country’s history. As a former resident of Berlin, I learned how German cultural obsessions had a tendency to take on surprising forms in East Germany, and I wanted to find out more. Galchen sketches out the G.D.R.’s ambivalent relationship with May: his work had been among Hitler’s favorites, so he was labelled a fascist; his books couldn’t be printed or sold, but they could be read; lending them around, though, could make a reader vulnerable to criticism or surveillance. By the time the Wall fell, May was back in socialism’s good graces. Yet through all these twists and turns, his fans remained passionately devoted. For those who, like me, are curious about German American-West obsessives under socialism, here is a sidebar on the East German interlude.

Even before the G.D.R.’s leaders embraced May in the eighties, the Wild West enjoyed a lively existence in the East. May’s books were hard to come by, but there were alternatives. As children, many East Germans read Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich’s series, “The Sons of the Great Bear,” published from 1951 to 1964 in the G.D.R., and therefore deemed free of potential ideological impurities. The state-owned East German film studio made the series into a film, in 1966. Twelve Westerns were produced between 1960 and 1980; they were shot to look like they were set in the western United States, but they were actually filmed in Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. East Germans wearing dark wigs played the supporting Native American cast behind the Yugoslavian actor Gojko Mitic.

As in West Germany, it wasn’t just books and films that drew crowds. Indianistikklubs (reënactments), founded in the fifties, and yearly gatherings like Indian Week, begun in 1973, were celebrated by East German citizens as occasions for escape and communal activity. The regional convocations were extremely popular, a cultural event that some looked forward to all year long. Hobbyists drove their Trabants (East German cars) out into the country, where they set up tepee camps in the warmer months. They slaved for hours on costumes made from creatively repurposed materials, like red Arbeiter flags; they smoked peace pipes, sparked fires with flint, and performed ritualistic dances to the bang of drums. Any large gathering not sanctioned by the government was considered suspect by the secret police, and government officials feared that contact between East German Indian hobbyists and Native Americans might lead to plans of escape. So moles were planted among the groups; by the time the Wall fell, the secret police had collected more than eight hundred pages of notes on the activities of Indianistikklubs.

The East German regime expended significant energy contorting cultural terminology to support the socialist cause. Most famously, the wall between East and West Germany was called the “anti-Fascist protective barrier.” The Wild West was no exception. Although just as popular in West Germany, the Indian obsession came to mean something different in the G.D.R. As Friedrich von Borries and Jens-Uwe Fischer, two German historians, write in “Socialist Cowboys: East Germany’s Wild West,” “What was a hobby for many in the West had an entirely different dimension in the East.” The Wild West was synonymous with America, itself a symbol of “imperialistic class enemies,” And so cowboys and Indians, those beloved archetypes of adventure, ended up in the “tension-fraught field of political symbolism.”

Wild West fever flourished anyway, and East German Indianisten, as they called themselves, framed their hobby in a way that their constrictive environment would allow. Indians were called “victims of U.S. imperialism,” and the destruction of their communities and natural environment was attributed to unchecked American expansion and aggression. East German citizens tried to emulate them in order to promote “Völkerfrieden durch Völkerfreundschaft” (“peace among peoples through friendship between nations”)—another way to unite the workers of the world.

The Indianisten formulated written resolutions in support of their oppressed brethren and gathered signatures. As one man interviewed in von Borries and Fischer’s book explains, “We share similar points of departure, we and the Native Americans—the GDR was, after all, also a reservation.” Another comments, “We wanted to join the Native Americans as comrades-in-arms in the fight against imperialism.” In one East German Western, the tribes form a “Union of all Red Men”in response to the violence brought by the white interlopers. They greet each other as “brother,” but as Amie Siegel comments in her non-fiction film “DDR/DDR” (2008), they “might as well have been saying ‘Comrade.’ ”

In this setup, cowboys were American class enemies, but they were also Fascists. If East Germany—in its self-conception—was founded in opposition to its West German neighbors as an anti-Fascist state, then Indians became even more sympathetic, because cowboys invading the American West were guilty of genocide. Every film featured a pogrom, where greedy oil speculators or gold diggers drove the native population from their homes. Here were East German actors posing as cowboys, acting out scenes of ethnic genocide and transport, expelling Indian communities with calls of, “We will exterminate you!”

Now that the G.D.R. is defunct, Germans no longer need to justify their Indian obsession in socialist terms—but, in fact, some still do. Though Germans from the east can join their western counterparts at the Karl May festivals and commemorations, members of Indianistikklubs formed in the east still convene and decamp to the countryside to spend summer weeks in tepees. Blond children frolic in fringed ponchos; men covered only by loincloths drink beer on picnic blankets and get a sunburn. Like so much else in the former East Germany, a trip to Indian Week is now an act of nostalgia for the old days of socialism: it’s a return to a simpler time—both of Native American tepee living and of East Germans pretending to be Native Americans living in tepees—when community and nature were prized. “The close-knit group” that the Indianisten describe in Siegel’s film return each year to revisit “the feeling of community, the feeling of being a family… The feeling is still [here] today.”

Since Germany’s reunification, some Indianisten have moved on from Indianistikklubs to a new hobby. The former cowboy-and-Indian hobbyists have begun to reënact the American Civil War—which, as one might imagine, was a pastime that was once strictly verboten. East Germans were brought up to see themselves as underdogs, and so they prefer to impersonate members of the Confederate Army. Many Germans from the former east, with far higher rates of unemployment, feel left behind by west’s economic boom, and they see the southern states as having suffered a similar fate. Reënactors follow a strict cycle, retracing the events of the Civil War over a five-year period. When the South loses, they begin again, from the beginning.

Photograph of hobby cowboys in Germany, in 2002, by Granser/Laif/Redux.